Biography | Roland Busch — Took the Siemens Chair After This Virtual Meeting

People treat a CEO handover as a scene in a packed hall.

On 3 February 2021 the hall was a screen.

Siemens AG held its Annual Shareholders' Meeting in virtual form because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The company's own press release from Munich that day recorded the end of Joe Kaeser's term and the succession long planned for Roland Busch.

Busch, then 56, had been deputy chief executive, chief operating officer, and chief technology officer.

He had sat on the managing board since 2011.

The Supervisory Board had already named him as Kaeser's successor at an extraordinary meeting in 2020, with the change to take effect at the latest at the close of this meeting.

The 3 February communiqué is the public date of the transfer.

A later Siemens curriculum line starts the presidency on 4 February 2021, the next calendar day.

The press release and the German reporting treat the meeting itself as the handover.

This pin is the rebuilt Konzernzentrale on Wittelsbacherplatz, now addressed Werner-von-Siemens-Straße 1 in Munich.

The new headquarters opened in 2016 around the historic Palais Ludwig Ferdinand.

The 2021 meeting did not fill that courtyard.

Shareholders joined remotely.

The legal seats of Siemens AG remain Berlin and Munich.

The operational headquarters from which the new president would run the firm is this block.

Kaeser left after more than forty years at the company and seven years as chief executive.

Jim Hagemann Snabe stayed as chairman of the Supervisory Board.

The physicist from Erlangen now held the chair of a group whose registered offices are two cities and whose public face on this square is a glass passage through a palace.

Photo: Rufus46, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Siemens, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.